The Affordable Care Act codified the worksite wellness exemption to the federal medical underwriting provisions in the group health plan market. This means companies are allowed to use an “outcomes-based” incentive model that provides financial rewards for those who satisfy a prescribed health standard such as a BMI of less than 30 or who meet a “reasonable alternative standard” or obtain a waiver from their physician. What some see as “rewards” others view as penalties or surcharges and, given the absence of evidence to confirm the role of such incentives in actually improving population health, the new provisions have unleashed a debate about the ethics and putative effectiveness of the new provisions.

When an employer group shifts from one health plan to another, why not allow them to take their claims data to the next health plan? That way, the new plan would gain immediate knowledge of the specific disease burden faced by its new members and be able to act accordingly vis-à-vis care management programs and other interventions. As it stands now, the new plan would have to wait many months and even then would lack the history that the earlier plan no longer needs. And when the new plan “finds out" about a member's condition, it might be due to a claim for an event that could have been prevented had the carrier had access to the earlier data.

Here’s how the system would work. When a group signs up with a carrier, it could reserve the right to have its data transferred if it changes carriers. Obviously, it wouldn’t be able to “see” its own patient-identified data any more than it does now, but the data would accompany the change of carriers.

Life is change. We here at Managed Care are breathing new life into our website by changing its look, but not only the look. Sure, it is more streamlined and easier on the eyes, but the change that excites us is in the content, which is richer and more interactive.

As we move Managed Care into the blogosphere, my curiosity was arosed about the number of active English language blogs. As with many internet related statistics, I found a wide range of estimates from 152 million (BlogPulse, February 2011) to 450 million — Hat Trick Associates. I unsuccessfully spent a bit of time searching for the number of healthcare specific blogs.

Suffice to say, a surfeit of blogs. Since we seek value in managed care, I pose the question, "What is the relative value of blogs?" — reading blog posts, contributing to blogs, operating blogs.